status for cd with null directory argument

[mtasaka]

Do you know what is the correct behavior of the below? (What does POSIX say?)

$ cd '' ; echo $?

bash 5.2 returned 0, bash 5.3 treats above as error, yash 2.57 also treats as error.

Background: the detail is very looong, however in short, with investigating

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/TSA2NDZ33LV5AZKR6QNRTG6LWW4XQSNS/

I've found that the above bash behavior change is causing the issue discussed above.

[mtasaka]

So POSIX.1-2024 explicitly treats this as errror:

https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1047
https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/commit/?h=devel&id=136cdf8108f2d6c6dd9710c544b1b7b6bd790617

[magicant]

The latest version of POSIX says:

The following operands shall be supported:

directory

An absolute or relative pathname of the directory that shall become the new working directory. The interpretation of a relative pathname by cd depends on the -L option and the CDPATH and PWD environment variables. If directory is an empty string, cd shall write a diagnostic message to standard error and exit with non-zero status. If directory consists of a single '-' () character, the cd utility shall behave as if directory contained the value of the OLDPWD environment variable, except that after it sets the value of PWD it shall write the new value to standard output. The behavior is unspecified if OLDPWD does not start with a character.

The emphasis is mine.

Yash changed the behavior in version 2.59 to reject cd '' as an error. I guess bash 5.3 did the same update.

FYI, the previous version of POSIX did not require cd '' to be an error.

The following operands shall be supported:

directory

An absolute or relative pathname of the directory that shall become the new working directory. The interpretation of a relative pathname by cd depends on the -L option and the CDPATH and PWD environment variables. If directory is an empty string, the results are unspecified.

[mtasaka]

Okay, than you!